IBM’s PowerAI Distribution To Support Google TensorFlow

IBM has announced that its PowerAI distribution for popular open source Machine Learning and Deep Learning frameworks on the POWER8 architecture now supports the TensorFlow 0.12 framework that was originally created by Google.

TensorFlow support through IBM PowerAI provides enterprises with another option for fast, flexible, and production-ready tools and support for developing advanced machine learning products and systems.

As one of the fastest growing fields of machine learning, deep learning makes it possible to process enormous datasets with millions or even billions of elements and extract useful predictive models. Deep learning is transforming the businesses of leading consumer Web and mobile application companies, and it is quickly being adopted by more traditional business enterprises as well.

IBM developed PowerAI, enterprise distribution and support for open-source machine and deep learning frameworks used to build cognitive applications. PowerAI helps reduce the complexity and risk of deploying these open source frameworks for enterprises on the Power architecture.

PowerAI is tuned for performance. It offers enterprise support on IBM Power Systems S822LC for HPC platforms used by thousands of developers in commercial, academic and hyperscale systems environments. These Power systems are built with IBM’s POWER8 with NVIDIA NVLink processor that is linked via the high-speed NVLink interface to NVIDIA’s Tesla Pascal P100 GPU accelerators. The CPU to GPU and GPU to GPU NVLink connections give a performance boost to deep learning and analytics applications.

In addition, deep learning and other machine learning techniques are being deployed across a wide range of industry sectors including banking, the automotive industry and retail.

IBM also added the Chainer deep learning framework to the latest release of PowerAI.